---

Textbooks

• The Fundamentals of Stellar Astrophysics, by George W. Collins II (originally published by W.H. Freeman in 1989; revised ADS online edition published in 2003).

• A classic text, full of wry humor, is Stellar Interiors: Physical Principles, Structure, and Evolution, by Hansen, Kawaler, and Trimble (2nd ed., Springer, 2004).

• Henny Lamers and Emily Levesque have written a very nice textbook titled Understanding Stellar Evolution that was published by IOP/AAS in 2017.

• You can probably determine the age of a stellar astronomer by which edition of the following classic book they prefer:
  1. Stellar Atmospheres by D. Mihalas (1st ed., 1970).
  2. Stellar Atmospheres by D. Mihalas (2nd ed., 1978).
  3. Theory of Stellar Atmospheres: An Introduction to Astrophysical Non-equilibrium Quantitative Spectroscopic Analysis by I. Hubeny and D. Mihalas (2014).

• The definitive reference for nuclear fusion processes in stars is Donald Clayton's Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis (McGraw-Hill, 1968).

• There are so many more. Kippenhahn et al. Cox & Giuli. Bowers & Deeming. Carroll & Ostlie. MacDonald. Gray. Novotny. Chandrasekhar. Links go to legal downloads where available, and please ask if you want a more detatiled bibliography.

---

Other Online Lecture Notes

Dr. Onno Pols from Utrecht wrote an excellent set of textbook-level notes on stellar interiors (i.e., stellar structure, thermodynamics, and nuclear fusion) and stellar evolution. Originals are here, and local copies are also provided, grouped into 5 PDF files (each containing more than one chapter):

1. Introduction
2. Mechanical and Thermal Equilibrium
3. Equation of State of Stellar Interiors
4. Polytropic Stellar Models

5. Energy Transport in Stellar Interiors
6. Nuclear Processes in Stars

7. Stellar Models and Stellar Stability
8. Schematic Stellar Evolution: Consequences of the Virial Theorem

9. Early Stages of Evolution and the Main Sequence Phase
10. Post Main Sequence Evolution Through Helium Burning
11. Late Evolution of Low and Intermediate Mass Stars

12. Pre-Supernova Evolution of Massive Stars
13. Stellar Explosions and Remnants of Massive Stars

---

Additional online resources include:

• Phil Armitage taught ASTR-5700 back in 2002, and still has his lecture notes online, despite not even being in Colorado any more. He also posted a huge review of star formation and pre-main-sequence evolution to the arXiv in 2015.

• Michigan State's Ed Brown wrote up lecture notes on stellar physics and posted them as a github repo (on the growing Open Astrophysics Bookshelf) and as a PDF on his own web page.

• For much more about stellar oscillations than what can be discussed in class, see a comprehensive (276-page) set of lecture notes by Jorgen Christensen-Dalsgaard. See also a two-part review of adiabatic and non-adiabatic stellar pulsations on arXiv.

• The late Rob Rutten created an extensive set of lecture notes on radiative transfer in stellar atmospheres (with a bit of an emphasis on the Non-LTE upper layers most relevant to the solar chromosphere). HERE is a link to Rutten's external web page, which contains the full set of PDF notes (275 pages) and many other useful files.

• Dr. J. B. Tatum posted many of his lecture notes on stellar atmospheres and radiative transfer. I've archived his 11 chapters here:

  1. Definitions of and Relations between Quantities used in Radiation Theory
  2. Blackbody Radiation
  3. The Exponential Integral Function
  4. Flux, Specific Intensity and other Astrophysical Terms
  5. Absorption, Scattering, Extinction and the Equation of Transfer
  6. Limb Darkening
  7. Atomic Spectroscopy
  8. Boltzmann's and Saha's Equations
  9. Oscillator Strengths and Related Topics
  10. Line Profiles
  11. Curve of Growth

---

Other Useful Files

• HERE is an ASCII data table giving some fundamental properties of stars and brown dwarfs along the zero-age main sequence. Sources for model data: (1) Ekstrom for M > 0.75 solar mass stars (ZAMS, non-rotating, Z=0.014). (2) Girardi for stars between 0.15 and 0.75 solar masses (ZAMS, Z=0.02). (3) Baraffe for M < 0.11 solar mass brown dwarf and planet models (quasi-ZAMS: age = 500 Myr).

• A more observationally focused table of main-sequence stellar properties is maintained by Eric Mamajek.

• HERE is an ASCII data table giving various numerical constants relevant to polytropes and the Lane-Emden equations as a function of polytropic index n.

• A short "Summary of Error Propagation," is archived locally because its original link at Harvard no longer works.

---

---